It’s easy to condition dogs to do the same thing repeatedly — especially when there’s food involved. It turns out it’s pretty easy for them to condition their owners, too. That’s the idea behind a new billboard for GranataPet, one of Germany’s leading premium pet food brands.
The billboard is located in a high-dog-traffic area and prompts the dog’s owner to check in at the billboard on foursquare. When they do, a small amount of GranataPet dogfood is dispensed for the dog to eat.
Repeat that a few times and very quickly the dog will start stopping at the billboard every day, a conditioned response to getting free food there. The dog is, in a way, conditioning the owner to check in at the billboard and, of course, to buy GranataPet dogfood (although I’m sure the dog doesn’t really care what brand it’s getting for free).
It doesn’t appear these billboards will be appearing en masse anytime soon, but it is a very fun concept that’s relatively easy to implement (a server polls for foursquare checkins and triggers the food dispenser when it detects a new visitor). It develops great brand recognition among the owners — and their dogs — and likely leads to lots of happy posts to Facebook and Twitter.
/via Ads of the World
A photo of the billboard from the GranataPet Facebook page:
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#1 by Robert Aitchison on March 28, 2011 - 11:28 am
This is a really interesting application, makes me excited to see what else is coming, there is a lot of potential for making Foursquare checkins truly interactive. Of course this doesn’t always work such as the Vons special program from last year where you rarely got the reward for checking in (only happened once for me)
#2 by Sam Edwards on March 28, 2011 - 3:00 pm
Very cool, but as soon as “Jumpers” start checking in there, that machine will be spilling out food onto the streets :-p